# Will we ever make contact with other intelligent life? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 4, 2009, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244 "2009-11-04T02:35:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244/41 "2009-11-05T15:42:17Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > It proves our capacity will go up. He talks about how when he was at MIT in the 1960s, he had a program that would match students up with colleges. Computers are now billions of times more powerful than they were back then regarding the computing capacity per dollar spent. Yes, but we are all (well anyone in the industry) already pretty familiar with the rate of progress in computing power. That’s the easy part. The hard part is understanding how to get intelligence out of that power. And that is far from trivial. If we used that power and just randomly threw together neural networks, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of them would be absolute garbage and do nothing. The singularity does not arrive just because the raw computing power to simulate a human brain exists. ---
**Author:** ![ivan\_astikov](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/58f4c7/32.png) [@ivan\_astikov](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ivan_astikov)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2009, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244/42 "2009-11-05T17:51:47Z")
> [@ianzin](#): > > Which raises another relevant question, looking at the same thing a different way: are ants aware that there is an intelligent life form called humans? However rudimentary the inter-species communication skills of an ant may be, if we spotted a group of ants line-dancing or making pictures by aligning groups of ants, we’d notice it. Problem is, ants aren’t known for their imagination and inventiveness, whereas we are. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2009, 1:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244/43 "2009-11-06T01:28:08Z")
The galaxy has too many leechers and not enough seeders. ---
**Author:** ![Markxxx](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5daacb/32.png) [@Markxxx](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Markxxx)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2009, 11:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244/44 "2009-11-09T23:30:56Z")
Whether there IS life is a different question from whether we’ll meet life, in whatever form of contact. The problems with this are several First is distance, space is unimaginably large, at least for most people. The Speed of Light is bascially a cosmic speed limit. It would be akin to saying, “My 80 year old granny lives in India and doesn’t own a car, so she’s gonna walk to to New York City.” Certainly it’s possible (OK she could float on an iceberg across the Bering Sea :)) but to do this would require her to go over mountains, stay the weather conditions etc and even if she did the OK, she’d likely be dead by the time she got there. So humans traveling to places where life could exist would be out of the question. That leaves us with having to be contacted or use of light waves (via the radio portion of the wave spectrum) Then again we have a problem which is distance. It can take years for our signal to reach a star we THINK might be capable of supporting a life form. If the signal reaches that area, AND it has life, we have to hope it’s at a state, in it’s civilization where they have developed radio. Suppose for a moment, some other “human-like” race was sending us radio signals but they were doing it from 1700 - 1800, then gave up. We didn’t have radio so we didn’t know they were sending us signals. If we’re sending signals to a place where there are human-like people but are ignorant of radio, we’d pass it up. The OP question poses an interesting inference, in that not only do we have to FIND life, we need to find life capable of understanding us. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [November 10, 2009, 4:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244/45 "2009-11-10T04:40:50Z")
By giant balloon-like creatures, thay blow around in the Jovian atmosphere? How would we ever communicate with those creatures? Or the Jovian moon Europa-there might be dolphin-like creatures, living in the oceans under the ice. We simply would never be able to communicate with such creatures. It may well be that primative live (lichens, plants) is plentful, but sentient life is not. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/will-we-ever-make-contact-with-other-intelligent-life/516244.md?page=2)